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Can Statistics Predict the Outcome of a War?
StatisticallyDeadGuy writes "A University of Georgia scientist has developed a statistical system that can, she claims, predict the outcome of wars with an accuracy of 80 percent. Her approach, applied retrospectively, says the US chance of victory in the first Gulf War was 93%, while the poor Soviets only had a 7% chance in Afghanistan (if only they'd known; failure maybe triggered the collapse of the USSR). As for the current Iraq conflict: the US started off with a 70% chance of a successful regime change, which was duly achieved — but extending the mission past this to support a weak government has dropped the probability of ultimate success to 26%. Full elaboration of the forecasting methodology is laid out in a new paper (subscription required — link goes to the abstract). Some details can be gleaned from her 2006 draft (PDF)."
It's 0% if you play "Global Thermonuclear War". The only winning strategy is not to play.
Sounds like fun. Let's test this theory =)
Life is not for the lazy.
Is that lots of people are going to suffer and die, and lots of money will be spent, usually with detrimental results to all parties involved.
Oh yeah, and the companies that make bombs and guns will get richer.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I notice that the probability of success in Iraq correlates well with George's approval rating.
She took a bunch of historical information about wars, built a model and then when run on that historical information it was 80% accurate.
Amazing stuff.
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
As in all projects, when you let the scope blow out, then the costs blow out proportionately. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the initial scope was to topple Saddam Hussein. Scope then changed to include installation of democracy.
Nobody wrote up a scope change request, let alone getting it signed off...
Hari Seldon, is that you?
As far as I know nobody has formally specified the 'win' outcome for the war -- so I'm a bit doubtful that anyone has worked out an EXACT 26% (not 25%! That number would sound like a guess! But 26% sounds like SCIENCE!) chance of the US side achieving it.
If the 26% really was worked out with a reasonable methodology, then the interesting part isn't the number so much as whatever definition they came up with of 'victory'.
That said, giving ridiculously exact answers to impossibly vague questions is fun and harmless. 92.8% of the time.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
That 74% of war historians think that 26% of war historians have less than 10% of a clue clue about more than 90% of what they are talking about, when it comes to statistics. This assessment of course is subject to adjustment depending on perceived public opinion and verified by use of the retrospectoscope.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Sometimes others will decide that you are going to play it whether you want to or not.
Actually, with her model hindsight is only 16/20.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The problem with this is that the model was "trained" on the same historical data on which it is eventually tested. This doesn't prove anything.
As an example, a defence contractor once built a system that would recognize wether or not a tank was in a picture. First the system was trained on half the "with tanks" and half the "without tanks" pictures. Next the system got a good percentage correct on the second half of the pictures. It turns out the "with tanks" pictures had been taken on a sunny day, and those without on a cloudy day. So the system was actually telling "sunny" or "cloudy".
In this case, it could very well be that her system predicts the outcome of the war, based on the weather in tokyo 6 weeks before the start of the war. This example was chosen so that you, not an expert in this field, immediately can dismiss this as a nonsense predictor. But as the model gets more complicated, and you feed it lots of parameters that might seem relevant, even the experts will no longer be able to see the value of such complicated predictions. At some point you just have to "trust the computer".
Aerodynamics: Yes. We understand the underlying principles, we've verfied the predictions made by the models in real life, and found that it matches very good.
In this case: No. Before I trust such a model, it would need to be verified (as is, no modifications allowed!) against say at least 20 wars that haven't started yet. If it preditcs the outcome of those correctly, the model has merit.
I'm not going to wait around (I hope).
Can someone explain me how she can go on about conflicts between states, when the majority of conflicts are characterized by the opposition not being a state? I also have a hard time accepting the definition of victory. She defines it as "A state can attain its political objectives in war by rendering its opponent physically incapable of continuing to fight" (or make them believe that such an outcome is unavoidable). Given these criteria, how can an asymmetric war be won? Is it possible to render every terrorist/freedom fighter "physically incapable of fighting"? It probably isn't, so how many attacks are "just" violence and how many attacks constitutes an opposition?
Ah, the joys of revisionism...
Let me see, what happened in Vietnam (and eerily enough, Korea didn't go that differently either.)
1. Actually refused to allow elections and backed an inept dictator that was hated even by the south. That's a funny way to spread democracy, you know.
2. It lost its chunk of Vietnam to the communists.
3. It actually created such an anti-american sentiment in Laos and Cambodia that they went Communist too. You know, let's bomb some countries which aren't our enemies, just because the communists smuggle arms and supplies through their territory. In fact, let's bomb a country that's our _ally_ FFS. If you trace the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, it went from a fringe group that noone really supported, to _massive_ support in the zones bombed by the Americans.
At any rate, voila, two more countries lost to communism as a result of inept American meddling in the area. Way to stop the spread of communism, buddy.
4. That and Korea scared China into flipping from a country just licking its wounds and wanting to be left alone, to becoming a lot more politically and militarily active. Just because some idiot generals wanted to push the border all the way to China, and at least one idiot actually advocated attacking China.
5. It takes some massive dose of revisionism to call it some spread of communism in the first place, when it was just a country (two, if you count Korea too), that just wanted to reunite. And that the _only_ reason it escalated to war is because the USA didn't allow elections.
Contrary to Domino theory bullshit and McCarthist propaganda, the USSR was _not_ your enemy at that point. The only reason why there was, say, a north and south Korea was because the Russians actually stopped their advance at the exact spot where the USA asked them to ask. The USSR was still licking its wounds after WW2 anyway, and it knew it's in no condition to start a world war.
You know what the USSR and China wanted at that point? They just wanted to have no border with NATO, if possible, because the USA had suddenly flipped from being their ally to treating them like mortal enemies. That's one reason why, for example, Stalin actually proposed to let Germany reunite if it stays neutral and doesn't join either pact. The wars in Korea and Vietnam just convinced them to rearm faster and help start the Cold War sooner.
And if you want something which stopped both sides, that was the rise of long ranged nuclear weaponry and the mutually assured destruction.
Redefining it as, basically, "nah, see, they calmed down because of the war (USA lost) in Vietnam" is pretty laughable.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That said, I find this very unconvincing. And why? Because it is actually very hard to measure the outcome of a conflict, especially when the actual strategic objective of the conflict may be a state secret on the side of the aggressor. Put simply, we do not really know, in the case of Iraq, what the real objective of the US Government is. Is it:
- To stabilise Iraq with a government that will be a more reliable client of the US than Saddam was?
- To destabilise Iraq and the Middle East to prevent power accumulations that threaten the US regional aircraft carrier, USS Israel?
- To maintain high oil prices by creating instability, enriching the Bush family and their clients?
- To keep up pressure on other states by showing that the US will intervene and create anarchy if it wishes (The old "remember what happened to XXX country?" "There is no XXX country." "Exactly, that's what you need to remember")
My point is that for any desired outcome other than the first, the US Government would be achieving its strategic objectives. The fact that these objectives might be objectionable to the majority of the US population is irrelevant; for most of history, wars have been fought by military elites without reference to the interests of the majority of the population. In exactly this way, Vietnam can actually be seen as a victory for the US if the strategic objective was to stop the expansion of Communism. Personally I don't believe in the domino theory, but if you do you can argue that the example of Vietnam stopped other regional states from going Communist.In the past, wars usually ended when one side ran out of resources, whether provisioning, human, strategic or geographical. The constraint on warmongers in democratic societies is that society can ultimately strangle the resources of its internal warmongers without, necessarily, killing anybody. It is also possible for democratic societies to change the playing field so that strategic objectives change or become irrelevant. (e.g. by doing so much business with other countries that it becomes impossible to pursue strategic objectives without doing more harm to yourself - which you could say is happening with the US and China.)
Pining for the fjords
Forget about the statistical model, the Slashdot blurb has completely missed the point (as usual) by emphasing it. The point that Mrs. Sullivan is trying to make - and it's a good point - is that the traditional criteria for assessing the outcome of the conflict and whether you have won or lost (such as the number of buildings blown up and enemies killed, number of square kilometers controlled, etc) have become irrelevant in new types of (asymetrical) conflicts, where the objectives are political more than geographical, and where sociological aspects (support of the population, curbing down radicalism or sectarianism, promoting a particular form of government) determine the outcome of the conflict more than raw firepower.
The relevant part:
Driving Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and overthrowing his government in 2003 was a brute force objective that was accomplished relatively quickly, for example, but quelling sectarian violence and building support for the current government has been much more difficult because it requires target compliance.
"We can try to use brute force to kill insurgents and terrorists, but what we really need is for the population to be supportive of the government and to stop supporting the insurgents," Sullivan said. "Otherwise, every time we kill an insurgent or a terrorist, they're going to be replaced by others."
So, don't panic. No one is seriously trying to "predict" the outcome of a war by statistics alone. It's about time the American academia and military ditch the Cold War mindset they've been stuck in since 1947, and start adjusting to the new realities of warfare and conflict resolution. This has happened in smaller countries (in Europe and elsewhere) some time ago, with varying degrees of success. French opposition to the war in Iraq, for instance, was largely based on a good understanding of which political and sociological forces would naturally prevail in Iraq once the artificial Baathist regime was terminated. In other words: yes, we can blow the country to bits, but once we've done that, there is very little that can be done to manage the country's politics afterwards.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
I completely agree there are wars started by psychopaths who just want to spread death and destruction while profiting as a consequence (both monetarily and through conquest). But the question then becomes, how exactly do you stop such a psychopath if not through war?
Wow, I get to play the Hitler card and still be on topic.
Dude, Condi Rice called and wants your phone number.
I've posted the text below to today's thread on vegetable oil, but I think it's relevant for this thread, so here goes a copy:
The actual reason your (I'm Brazilian) government doesn't do this [the message I was replying to suggested USA simply stopped using foreign fuels] isn't because of oil itself. It's because it has since the 1970s a deal with OPEC by which all OPEC countries would accept only US dollars as payment for their oil, no matter who was purchasing it.
Now think about it: Germany, Brazil, China etc. want to purchase oil. Their currency isn't US dollar, it's something else. So, they must first acquire US dollars, and then use these dollars to purchase the oil. How do they do obtain US dollars? Well, the US government doesn't give US dollars to other countries for free, to get some they must sell goods to USA. At good prices, mind you, otherwise Americans won't purchase their goods, but those sold by some other country.
All these countries get the US dollars they need to purchase oil. But not only this amount. Imagine what would happen if for some reason Americans slowed down the purchase of their goods? No US dollars, no oil. Pretty bad, eh? So, all countries build reserves with billions of US dollars, as a way to purchase oil when and if the need arises. Now, obviously, some of these US dollars do come back to USA, otherwise USA would have no exports at all. OPEC countries, for instance, import lots of things from USA. They have tons of US dollars available due to only accepting this as a means of payment. Even so, though, most of these US dollars remain outside USA. Everyone has it, and everyone needs it, so other countries also allow exchanging goods among themselves using US dollars.
Now, US dollars reserves in foreign countries, as well as foreign exchange of goods using US dollars, both cause one important effect, more important than the above mentioned cheap import goods: less US dollars inside USA. And less dollars inside USA equals low inflation. In other words, this system allows USA to export its inflation to other countries, so that Americans themselves don't feel it. Were all the US dollars abroad come back to USA, and USA would feel a recessive inflation so extreme that 1929 would pale in comparison.
So, as I said in the beginning, the problems isn't oil itself. It's the money supply. Were OPEC to begin accepting other currencies, all these US dollars floating outside USA would be far less needed, thus starting to flow back into USA. And, guess what? Some months before USA deciding to wage war on Iraq, Saddam Hussein had decided to accept other currencies. Recently Iran has also shown interest in doing so. And what we began to hear? That USA is thinking about waging war on Iran.
So, don't be fooled. No matter whether the government is Republican or Democrat, any President of the USA will do the exact same thing. Because not doing, by allowing OPEC to accept other currencies, will mean years or even decades of extreme suffering to the American people. And no one has any idea how to solve the problem by any means other than bullying OPEC countries into conformance.
On the other hand, China, Russia, the European Union, all of them hate this system, because it ties their development to whatever is happening inside USA. And all of them would love to have their currencies among those accepted by OPEC countries, for this would yield them the same benefits USA have: inflation export and direct, non-USA dollar backed, cheap goods imports from all those countries who would need to build reserves of their currencies.
Do you smell 3rd World War on the air? I do. In a few years, decades if we're lucky, at everyone's backyard.
[PS for this statistics thread: if you consider that the actual goal is to stop OPEC countries from accepting currencies other than the US dollar, then so far it's being successful. Maybe not 100% so, but nevertheless more than if there were no war. Add this consideration to the statistical analysis and I bet its result would be very different.]
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
But if you use, say, half the wars in the past 200 years as data to create the model, and then find that it predicts the other half (which were NOT used as data) accurately, doesn't that show some predictive power? What if you used it on some obscure wars whose outcome you didn't know until after you'd run the model - how would that be different from using it on a current/future war? The model doesn't know whether you know the outcome or not, unless you're being dishonest and futzing with it every time to get the results you want.
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Because we DO know the outcome, maybe not specifically, but generally, and those generalities are built into our assumptions, whether we use the specific data or not. That is especially true for historical studies. For example, we know that feudalism died out, so we're inclined to negatively weight a feudalistic society against a monarchy. Historically that is valid. However, if a future feudal society were to emerge so much would have changed that the assumptions for negatively weighting feudalism would no longer be valid - and the model would have no predictive power. It all has to do with subtle interactions between "independent" variables, and the impossibility from separating things like fascism from the other variables like depression in the 30s and 40s.
I don't know about that exact quote, but a few dozen sites seem to attribute the quote "Peace is the interlude between two wars" to an Indian spiritual leader called "Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba". There are other attributions (such as somebody's unnamed boss), but this seems to be the most popular. If nothing else, try a google search with 'interlude' as one of the key words (along with war / peace).
Just in case that hits the nail on the head - send your $5 to a Multiple Sclerosis research center plzkthx.
How do we prevent the contamination of our precious bodily fluids?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White